Which of the following is more likely to get you to drive slower down a street?  Or to get the majority of car drivers on that street to slow down?

·   A talk with a friend about the dangers of speeding to yourself and others.

·   A newly posted sign announcing a lower speed limit.

·   A stop sign placed in the middle of the block.

·   A series of speed bumps along the road.

Each of these might have an impact.  But changing the structure of the road is likely to have the greatest impact on the largest number of people over the longest period of time.  And the opposite is also true:  a long, smooth, straight-away down a wide road with few intersections or visual distraction invites speed – and most of us instinctively respond no matter what the posted limit.  Similarly, the lack of safe sidewalks or bike paths makes us much more likely to use our cars for even short trips.  Travel behavior is largely shaped by the transportation environment we inhabit.

So what?  Well, to the extent that transportation impacts global warming (it produces about a third of global greenhouse gases), or the livability of our neighborhoods (the transformation of urban villages into isolating suburban sprawl, and perhaps even the pulling apart of today’s multi-generational families, can be partially blamed on the automobile), or the growing diabetes epidemic (significantly caused by obesity which is significantly caused by lack of physical activity)…then how we move around matters.

In the public health world, the environmental equivalents to road structure are the systemic patterns that make some things easy to do – the “default choices” – and others more difficult.  Nearly two-thirds of US adults are overweight, and nearly half of that group is obese.  But our “obesogenic environment” surrounds us with opportunities to remain physically passive while we eat too much of faux-foods deliberately manufactured to trigger our evolution-based biological craving for fat, salt, and sugar.  “Everyone knows that you shouldn’t eat junk food and you should exercise,” says Kelly D. Brownell, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. “But the environment makes it so difficult that few people can do these things.”

And, as we all know, like New Year resolutions, dieting doesn’t work.  “If you take a changed person and put them [back into] the same environment, they are going to go back to the old behaviors,” says Dr. Dee W. Edington, the director of the Health Management Research Center at the University of Michigan.  “[But] if you change the culture and the environment first, when you get [personal] change it sticks.”

As another health researcher has pointed out, “Personal life-style is socially conditioned. . . . Individuals are unlikely to eat very differently from the rest of their families and social circle. . . . It makes little sense to expect individuals to behave differently than their peers; it is more appropriate to seek a general change in behavioral norms and in the circumstances which facilitate their adoption.”

Unfortunately, neither in transportation nor public health have the full implications of this reality been fully absorbed.  During the recent debates over national healthcare some of the fiercest attacks were against the “nanny state” proposal to encourage bicycling or the “anti-free market” idea of influencing the food system.  On the other hand, the fact that primary prevention and systemic health promotion were even part of the national debate was (minimally) encouraging.  And a new paper by the new Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, might provide the basis for renewed strategic thinking in both fields, although transportation advocates will have to start by translating some of its ideas and language into their own framework and jargon – a task that the following hopefully begins.  Continue Reading »

Probably no one fully understands all the intricacies of transportation funding decision-making.  Federal law, regulations, and funding levels set the context – although those are all interactively influenced by the desires of and power relationships among key interest groups, as well as by the electoral pressures felt by elected officials.  The same dynamic exists at the state level, with the political sphere extending from the state house  both upward to federal allies and down to municipal leaders.

Sitting in the middle of all this is are a series of “official” transportation funding decision-making bodies called Metropolitan Planning Organizations, or MPOs.   Massachusetts has 13 of these bodies, composed of state, regional, and local officials.   Transportation projects suggested by state or local agencies and governments are presented to the appropriate regional MPO, which then selects a very few of them for inclusion on the Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) list.  The state Department of Transportation then assembles these lists into a prioritized State Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP) list.   Available funds are then used to implement the proposals.

Unfortunately, this description says nothing about what criteria and  processes are used to make these decisions.  And maybe because so much is unclear, one of the results of the current MPO process is that road expansion and upgrades get almost all the highway funding – whether or not they include meaningful bike or pedestrian facilities – with very little money going for explicit bike or pedestrian facilities.  The state’s current four-year project funding list includes $770 million for highway expansion but almost none of the potential path projects.

It is our belief that the state’s current MPO system is deeply flawed in four ways:  in the membership of the MPOs and their advisory committees, in the criteria they use to prioritize spending, and in the non-transparency of the decision-making process itself.

Continue Reading »

Creating change requires awareness and good intentions.  It also requires muscle.

Massachusetts now has a long list of laws and regulations requiring the transformation of our transportation system from car-centric to multi-modal, from speedways to pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly “complete streets”, from polluting to clean, from energy-wasting to sustainable, from green-house-gas emitting to climate-friendly, from disease and obesity facilitating to active and healthy.

But it’s not clear how much muscle all the new laws and regulations provide for those who seek to create the 21^st century transportation system our political leaders have promised, either in mass transit or in road design (which is the focus on this post).   Transportation Secretary Jeff Mullan seems committed to change and MassDOT has begun a major civic input effort.  But little has yet been done to change the existing transportation decision-making process to give increased leverage to groups with a stake in moving away from our car-centric status quo.

Perhaps that’s why while MassDOT’s new Capital Investment Plan says it needs $10 million a year for ten years to create currently proposed shared use paths for pedestrians and cyclists, there’s nothing about actually spending the money.  The reason is that almost all the path projects have been removed from the state’s rolling four-year list of projects to receive funding.  Instead, over $770 million will be spent on highway expansion.

And it may be why, despite the official commitment to “complete streets,” that bike and walking advocates have to repeatedly fight, in project after project, for MassDOT road designers to include more than minimal compliance with standards for sidewalks, bike facilities, street crossings, and other non-car-focused facilities.  The only measurement that seems to count is traffic flow – which engineers always assume will increase in the future.  So the burden of limited street-space continues to be disproportionately dumped on the very modes that the state should be encouraging. Continue Reading »

The debates leading up to the passage of the 2009 Transportation Restructuring Act had three themes:

• Organizational & Operational Reform:
  • Creating a unified transportation authority that took a systemic approach and ended the infantile (and wasteful) feuding among the Turnpike, Highway Department, MBTA, Regional Transit Authorities, Mystic Bridge, and other transportation agencies.
• Systemic Transformation:
  • Begin transforming our car-centric, imported fossil-fuel dependent, polluting, obesity-enabling, and increasingly dysfunctional transportation system into something better able to help Massachusetts meet the challenges of the current century.
• Financial Stability:
  • Ending the funding shortfalls that have left every part of our transportation system unable to maintain current infrastructure, provide appropriate customer service, or meet growing demand.

Under the slogan of “reform before revenue” the final legislation walked away from the revenue issue.  However, within the area of reform the law was very explicit about the need for both organizational unification and systemic transformation.

To their credit, MassDOT’s leaders have been creative and relentless about the first of these challenges.  They are re-inventing MassDOT while keeping everything moving: it’s like repairing an airplane while it is in the air.  And MassDOT appears to be creating a unified organization out of warring factions, creating a culture that stresses customer satisfaction and excellent performance, even creating a hierarchy that engages and values worker involvement.  It is an impressive piece of work requiring state-of-the-art management skills that any cutting-edge corporation would happily spend a fortune to obtain.

But while Secretary Mullan has made the transformative agenda an explicit part of his speeches and policy, it has not been implemented to the same extent as the organizational unification.  To be sure, some degree of transformation emerges out of the successful completion of organizational reform.  However, that is not enough – not just in order to create the type of transportation system we need to survive economically and environmentally, but also in order to lay the foundation for the financial reforms that will ultimately be needed to keep the transportation system functional.

If we are ever to successfully confront the transportation funding crisis, it will only be because the public has come to understand the key role that transportation plays not just in mobility but in personal health, in community well-being, in environmental and climate protection, and in job creation and economic competitiveness.  And doing this requires not simply getting people and things cost-effectively from one place to another.  MassDOT has to be not only excellent but visionary, not only efficient but transformative.  It requires a clear vision of the type of communities and lives we hope to create for ourselves and our children, explicitly describing how each project will move us closer to those goals, and then measuring our progress over time.  MassDOT has to project hope for, and a method of moving towards, a better future.

As part of this, in this time of fiscal constraint it might be smart to begin the transformative process by massively expanding the state’s portfolio of small, lower-cost projects spread out around the state in respond to local initiatives from advocates and municipalities.  These are likely to have a more visible impact on people’s daily lives than most of the large-scale road projects now planned.  And it might be possible to further leverage the impact of these small expenditures by integrating them with existing public programs, such as the Department of Public Health’s Mass In Motion campaign.

Continue Reading »

With GreenDot, Massachusetts has placed itself among the national leaders on climate-protecting, sustainable, healthy transportation.  And the challenges MassDOT has to deal with as it moves from general policies to effective action under fiscal constraint will create a path that other state’s will need to follow.

GreenDOT has three goals:

• “Reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” in activities directly under MassDOT’s own control by at least 7.3% by 2020 and 12.3% by 2050 compared with 1990 levels,” thereby meeting its share of the greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions required by the state’s 2008 Climate Protection and Green Economy Act.
• “Promote the healthy transportation modes of walking, bicycling, and public transit,” as required by the Healthy Transportation Compact provisions of the 2009 act that created MassDOT, and the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act.
• “Support smart growth development,” as required by several state policies.

Fully implementing these goals will profoundly change the state’s entire transportation system.  The GreenDOT policy directive contains a list of implementation strategies (called “Exhibit B”) that MassDOT will use.  As is appropriate for an initial statement they are very high level and non-specific.  For example, it says that “state-wide planning documents…will integrate the three GreenDOT goals” and “All MassDOT projects must include accommodation of pedestrians and bicycles…”

A big question is if, in this time of tax-phobia and limited public funds, the state can keep GreenDOT’s promise from being separated from its reality by a canyon of missing resources.  The following is a list of five, low-cost steps that MassDOT might want to consider.  Of course, just because they don’t take a lot of money doesn’t mean that they will be politically easy.  Still, all five are consistent with MassDOT’s announced strategies.  And all five will significantly contribute to giving GreenDOT the transformative impact that the law and the public expect.

• Analyze all current and pending projects for their contribution to achievement of the three goals; stop or scale back those with a negative impact.
• Revamp membership and procedures of the MPOs so that funding decisions are shaped by the three goals.
• Build-in more public oversight and muscle to keep the government on track.
• Move beyond the “Highway Design Guide’s” flexibility to require prioritization of Environmental, Walking, Bicycling, and Transit facilities.
• Refocus on small, local projects and programs to continue progress despite the continuing fiscal constraints.

Continue Reading »

Some more thoughts about how to make it safer for cyclists to get through intersections, how we walk/ride on paths, and how to speed bus traffic through congested streets.

IMPROVING INTERSECTION SAFETY — Let Bikes Go When an Early Walk Signal Flashes

GETTING PEOPLE OFF CENTER — Paint Center Lines in Multi-use Paths

THE VEHICLES OF CHOICE – Why Buses and Bikes Are the Only Modes That Will Solve Urban Transportation Problems.

SPEEDING UP THE BUS:  Prioritization

Continue Reading »

• BABY STROLLERS and BIKES on the T

The MBTA has come a long way in allowing bikes on the subway, commuter trains, and busses.  But there are still limits, especially during rush hour.  Which is why, when I got on the T the other day during commuting time, my attention was caught by the presence of several baby strollers.

These are no longer the compact, umbrella strollers they were when I was pushing infants around.  Today, they are more like mini-SUVs with enough space to carry an entire closet worth of paraphernalia on top of wheels about as big as the one on my wheelbarrow.  Some of them hold two or even three kids, often way past the toddler stage.  In other words, they’re big.  And there were three of them on the train.  No one complained, in fact, people happily moved out of the way and did the typical smile-at-the-baby routine as they moved.  I was particularly happy to see that it was mostly fathers who had picked up the kids at daycare and were taking them home.

But I couldn’t help wondering.  What is the difference between one of these strollers and a bike with an attached child seat?  And if it’s ok to bring these 5-foot-long-by-3-foot-wide devices on to the T without restrictions, why not bicycles?   And would it make a difference if some of the cyclists were willing to say “goo, goo?” Continue Reading »

One of the core insights of political strategic is the need to set expectations.  Right now, the state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the Charles River bridges from falling into the river and (after being pressured by advocates) to re-align the surface layout to provide greater access and safety for pedestrians and cyclists.  Traffic on all the bridges has been congested for years, from long before the repair work began.  Actually, the problem is mostly caused by the crazy intersections and rotaries at the entrances and exits to the bridges, rather than on the bridge span itself – although we tend not to think of it in this way.

We have short memories; most people now associate the current traffic tie-ups with the repair work.  And most people assume that traffic will flow smoothly once the work is done.

But it won’t.  There are simply too many cars for the available road capacity.  And we’ve learned that building more roads just attracts more cars.  Congestion will remain.

The risk is that the public will blame the continuing back-ups on the allocation of road space for pedestrian or cyclist use.  They will not understand that the only solution to car jams is to reduce the number of single-person automobiles, and that every additional walker or bicyclists means one less car.  And instead of building on the multi-modal momentum created by the bridge work, the Commonwealth will retreat into another era of car-pandering design.

We need, therefore, to begin setting realistic expectations about what the bridge program will accomplish and, more importantly, what we must do to create an economically sustainable, environmentally non-destructive, health-supporting, and mobility-enhancing 21^st century transportation – prioritize public transportation, walking, bicycling, and shared-use vehicles.  We have to create a coordinated system of facilities, incentives, and disincentives to encourage people to not drive alone.  As people as diverse as US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino have said, “the car is no longer king.” Continue Reading »

(MassDOT has requested public comment on the first draft of its Capital Investment Plan.  The following are my thoughts.  I encourage others to read through the CIP <http://www.massdot.state.ma.us/planning/documents/2011-2015HwyCapInvestmentPlan.pdf> and submit their own comments  to MassDOT’s Office of Transportation Planning, 10 Park Plaza, Room 4150, Boston, MA 02116  <planning@eot.state.ma.us>)

One of the hidden gems in the 2009 reform law creating Massachusetts new Department of Transportation is the requirement for a five year Capital Investment Plan (CIP).  The state spends billions of dollars a year on our transportation system;  creating a plan that maps out what is needed to meet our mobility, prioritizes spending, and reveals remaining funding and project gaps is a no-brainer.  In fact, MassDOT is required to create “a comprehensive state transportation plan… [to] ensure a safe, sound, and efficient public highway, road, and bridge system, to relieve congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve the quality of life in the Commonwealth by promoting economic development and employment…[and] cost-effectively meet the transportation needs of all residents.”

In the recently issued draft of the first CIP, MassDOT acknowledges that “while much important work has been done in the development of this first iteration of the capital investment plan, much more still needs to be accomplished to meet the vision of the Act.”  Unfortunately, this is an extremely correct statement.  Therefore, it is important to suggest ways that future versions of the Plan could be made more transparent and useful as a road map for the implementation of the transportation Act’s vision – and to also point out ways that the current version points in the wrong direction.

Key to improvement would be restructuring the Plan around what must be done to achieve the state’s transportation goals, not just relating to mobility but also including transportation-related goals such as clean air and water, smart growth, physical activity and public health, community livability and social connections, as well as economic development – whether spelled out in the Transportation Reform Act or other laws and regulations.  Accomplishing our goals requires going beyond maintenance of our current assets to describe the targeted, transformative investments needed to move from our current car-centric trajectory towards the 21^st century, multi-modal vision embodied in the Commonwealth’s new transportation modernization act.  It also requires correcting the current car-dominant imbalance in our investment plans to give special priority to transit, pedestrian, and bicycling facilities.  Finally, it requires identifying and empowering a group within MassDOT to take the lead in creating the needed plans. Continue Reading »

We all know that being physically activity is good for you — good for your weight, good for your overall health, good for your mood, and good as a way to get around.  But recent research suggests that bicycling is particularly good — even better than other forms of physical activity.  This is important because, other than public transportation — whose routes are limited and expansion is very expensive — cycling is the only real large-scale alternative to cars for short, every-day trips and commutes. It is also important because it means that we need to be prioritizing bike facilities in every transportation plan and road design.  Continue Reading »